haaayes wrote:This is a really long shot but my grandma won't stop going on about some horror movie she's never been able to find again about a little doll (she said it was like a voodoo doll, i always imagined like a blair witchy kind of 'doll') that kept trying to kill the people that bought it. At one point she says they put it in the oven and you think its over but then you hear the music and it attacks them again (inb4 'every horror movie ever')

Best lead I have is that it was part of a 3-part anthology of unrelated horror stories. Would have been shown on TV in the UK sometime in the 70s or 80s.

sje46 wrote:I remember seeing this a few years ago. It seemed like it was made in the 90s. I remember three or so people from different fields, and they were in a castle or some kind of fort by the sea or something, walking around. I think at least one was a woman. They were having a long conversation about various things...like their different respective fields. I'm not sure what the fields exactly were..maybe like physics, philosophy, psychology. Maybe. The only thing I can recall them specifically talking about is how at the atomic level, particles become more fields of probability than solid things....quantum physics stuff. It had the feel of a Michael Chricton novel...explaining mind-blowing scientific things in an easy-to-understand way. It wasn't a thriller though. I didn't watch the whole thing...maybe only 20 or 30 minutes.I'm probably very inaccurate with this

could it be "the andromeda strain"? or "the sphere"?

pages and pages have passed, but still. This is called Mindwalk and it is ENTIRELY LONG but there's some great views of Mont St Michel, where it was filmed.

sje46 wrote:I remember seeing this a few years ago. It seemed like it was made in the 90s. I remember three or so people from different fields, and they were in a castle or some kind of fort by the sea or something, walking around. I think at least one was a woman. They were having a long conversation about various things...like their different respective fields. I'm not sure what the fields exactly were..maybe like physics, philosophy, psychology. Maybe. The only thing I can recall them specifically talking about is how at the atomic level, particles become more fields of probability than solid things....quantum physics stuff. It had the feel of a Michael Chricton novel...explaining mind-blowing scientific things in an easy-to-understand way. It wasn't a thriller though. I didn't watch the whole thing...maybe only 20 or 30 minutes.I'm probably very inaccurate with this

could it be "the andromeda strain"? or "the sphere"?

pages and pages have passed, but still. This is called Mindwalk and it is ENTIRELY LONG but there's some great views of Mont St Michel, where it was filmed.

of friggin course Philip Glass did the music for it

I was in a Q&A session with him and my friend asked about working with movie directors and producers. He gave a very lengthy answer, mostly composed (heh) of tangents, but he did say a lot were easier to work with than others. His style of music is probably pretty easy to work in wherever, too.

Sockmonkey wrote:Ok, this was one of your animated sword-and sorcery movies from the 70's or 80s. All I can remember is that it had a young hero main character and his companions which were a faun-type magical critter who could shapeshift and a gnome/dwarf/halfling type thing. (possibly two of them)The big bad was some sort of shadow creature that was spreading darkness over the land and at the end when they went to the big bad's tower/castle thingy the faun guy tries to change into a giant eagle to carry everyone but barely manages to be a chicken for a few moments because the evil darkness is blocking his changeling powers.During the final confrontation the young hero fights the shadow critter by standing close in front of the gnome dude who has a hat with a candle holder in it. This allows him to cast his own shadow on the far wall just as big as the shadow critter and they do battle in that way. I remember the wind blowing out the candle which almost dooms them before the gnome dude can relight it. When the shadow creature slashes at the hero's shadow he gets hurt as if struck directly.Once the villan is beaten the darkness starts to recede and the castle goes kefloooey. Fortunately with the darkness broken the changeling has his full powers back and is able to change into a huge bird for them to escape on.

I've been looking for this for years. It turns out that I've had it on my hd for at least a year now! I came upon your post after remember this scene on a whim.

Fast-fowarding to the ending, I see the scene played out where the hero takes a nasty cut on his back from a shadow creature.

The movie appears to be "Faeries" from 1981. It was playing at my Uncle's house one saturday evening after dinner. Somehow I remember the animation looking better, more-detailed. But...memory is imperfect. Anyhow, hope this helps.

suffer-cait wrote:i saw this on tv just the other day, it's an episode of some tv show i think. anyway, the bit that i remember was off a guy talking to this really pretty girl who apparently is a porn star. i guess they ha met the night before or something at a party or something and got to talking about her ambitions. and for some odd reason they have run into eachother again and are walking down the street to her "workplace" he is berating her for her job. she gets into a van and he follows saying he is her agent and pissing off the guys in the van. he is demanding to speak to the director and the guy in the back of the van is like "i'm the director, this is the set" they proceed to film the "movie" i think the leading actor is a black guy. she's sucking his cock and the agent guy is freaking out and being awkward and stuff. any ideas? i know it seems a bit generic.

also bumping my last unanswered post:it's a children's movie i think i watched it when i was 4, so 1994ish. it was about two kids (one boy one girl, i think) who would go down a slide in their back yard and they would go through a portal to another world at the bottom. this world was extreamly colorful (of course) and full of people in colorful animal suits (not that we wee supposed to know that there were humans inside, anyway) the "little bunny foo-foo" song was in it and there was a merry-go-round....i think it may have sent the kids home... and i'm pretty sure that one of the main animals was a bear...

The movie was Big Rock Candy Mountain. I loved that movie!!!! I'm honestly about to watch it again and reminisce.

brokedownsystem wrote:I've been looking for this for years. It turns out that I've had it on my hd for at least a year now! I came upon your post after remember this scene on a whim.

Fast-fowarding to the ending, I see the scene played out where the hero takes a nasty cut on his back from a shadow creature.

The movie appears to be "Faeries" from 1981. It was playing at my Uncle's house one saturday evening after dinner. Somehow I remember the animation looking better, more-detailed. But...memory is imperfect. Anyhow, hope this helps.

I have vivid memories of there being two movies from the 80s or early 90s that use to be available all the time on On Demand back in the late 90s or early 2000s. Very much like the 2005 version of the island it portayed characters in institutionalized type living quarters where their calorie intake, excersize, and health are closely monitored and physical contact is discouraged. They are also trying to " win the lotto" and be sent to " the island" where they can be free. They are encouraged to spend their free time sitting in a vitual reality machine to pass the time and while most enjoy the vr experience the main character ( a young woman maybe 16 or 17) although constantly being coaxed by her mother to use the vr machine, is dissatisfied with this and chooses to spend her time in in real life setting as boring as it may be. ( I remember the mother shown enjoying a vr experience of tanning on the beach) I honestly do not remember the 2nd movie only that they were late 80s or early 90s and the first is so much like the 2005 version that I was sure it was a remake but I cannot find ANYTHING about these two films. No credit to the originals anywhere no mention of it no youtube google no chat forum I cannot find a TRACE and have been looking for 6 or so years. Anyone else remember these originals? Am I remembering the names wrong? Id love to find them Im starting to feel crazy Thanks

In the start of Clonus, there are young people living in an institution. They perform many physical fitness exercises. They await a day when they can pass all fitness exams and go to America. There is no virtual reality. The staff at the institution wears black clothes, because they're the bad guys. The innocent young adults wear white, I think. Almost always they are shown in exercise attire.

It goes on from there, but I just wanted to point out that parts of the plot are similar to what you described, but the virtual reality is missing, they don't win a lottery, and they are promised a trip to America instead of to an island.

okay so not much to go on but...when i was younger my family would rent movies from family video. There was a childrens tv show or movie that involved a scientist and an assistant with a frankenstein like character and in one part there is like an evil doll. Its from early 2000's and before. Please help, it drives me crazy not being able to find it!

I've been trying to find this anime for the last year or so. I watched it originally on CrunchyRoll but haven't been able to find it again. I thought it was called something like "Eternal After School" but I can't find any results for anything similar to that. I think it is fairly recent, definitely no earlier than the 2000s.

Plot is essentially a slice-of-life and follows a boy (~12ish), and three girls (two around the same age as the boy, one around 6-8 -- the age where yelling "ochinchi(n)"/"penis" at the top of your lungs down empty echoing streets is still hilarious [this happened in an early episode]). They appear to be the only survivors of some event that got rid of the rest of the population. The event took place over the course of weeks, where these dark blob-like things appeared and essentially took everyone. It is unclear whether the people are dead or just abducted. The kids have a garden where they grow food, and they take trips into town/city to get whatever else they need. The blob things still exist and they have to avoid them --there is an episode where they go swimming/tubing and I think one of the girls is almost taken. Another episode they find an area where a group of people held out for a decently long while, including some soldiers -- they find a generator that is powering a freezer there and they get to have ice cream, and they kind of salute the memory of the soldier responsible (I think the boy wears the soldier's helmet).

The boy is haunted by the memory of a girl he had a crush on throughout the series; he has flashbacks to when everyone was disappearing when they met and he walked to school the same way she did, then there's a flashback to a day when she no longer showed up (presumably taken by a blob). There is an episode late in the series where it appears he transports back in time (sudden random time travel!) in time to save her from a blob that appears at her all-girls school. She mentions that her family is going to try to escape to the mountains or something, and I think gives him the phone number to their house up in the mountains for if they both escape. Last scene I recall is him in a phone booth dialing the number and it ringing, and I can't remember if it picked up.

Seems fairly likely to have been based on a manga/light novel, but haven't had luck there either.

okay, so this is weird but... i remember there was this movie that came out in like the last 7 years. there was a creepy uncle, his niece that came to live with him, and some other woman. the uncle was wealthy and drove some cool classic car. he was weird in some way - maybe people were trying to kill him or his niece? i recall something about food. also, the girl was precocious. i recall a tennis racket or something.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

IMDB review wrote:Having watched the terrible decline in many areas of movie making over the past 20 years, i think 'Stoker' is a clear example of a movie that is all style and little else. Chan-Wook Park seems to be idolized by the chosen few who seem to think his movies are pure art. Quite where this comes from i have no idea. Take the 'Stoker' storyline; Daddy dies, Uncle appears from his travels, Mummy falls in love with Uncle, Uncle has a crazed sexual longing for his niece, cue over the top killings. Add to all of this a collage of 'so called' cool scenes including the bursting of a foot blister in extreme close up, the spreading of tennis balls on a court, nicely placed boxes of shoes on a bed, an egg being rolled around a table with a weird crunching sound,the daughter dressed in strange 'Meeks Cutoff' movie leftovers,the Uncle who drives a sports car alongside a school bus of screaming girls, the horrendous eating sounds of the daughter at each meal time (maybe something to do with her super hearing) and on and on. A total mess of footage that we are meant to see as 'total Art-house'. Matthew Goode must have laughed his way through this garbage thinking of the paycheck. Nicole Kidman simply did what she has done in many of her previous movies by acting strange. Last but not least, the very over rated Mia Wasikowska who simply plays the oddball and is better known for her unpronounceable name and whiter than white skin. This movie is typical of today's output by directors making a name for themselves with sub standard crap pretending it is art.I have not been so bored since i watched the aforementioned 'Meeks Cutoff'. Straight in with a bullet as one of the worst movies of this decade.

Fowels wrote:Here's one that I have searched for and failed to find for years now. Hope someone might have a clue!

I believe it was of British origin, but it aired in Australia, possibly on the ABC (though they have been unhelpful so maybe not), in the early 2000s or thereabouts.

It was set in the near future, where the polar ice caps had been melted (I think they mentioned by nuclear weapons), and the British Isles were now composed of many small islands. This was explained in some kind of classroom video by a teacher I think, as the main characters were kids or teenagers at the most.

Some of these kids had psychic powers of some kind. I don't remember much, except one girl who had the power to turn stuff inside out. She could turn paint cans inside out, and during the climax of one episode, turned the fuel tank of an outboard motor inside out, as they were being pursued by some guys in a dinghy. There was some plot about refugees involved, or being pursued by these guys? There was a scene where some child's doll is a plot point, because she loses it, and then one of the other kids sees it mounted on the radiator of a truck. I think the owner of the truck was a kidnapper or a slaver or something like that?

An episode I remember more vividly is them discovering a house on an island, and meeting this strange lady with an eyepatch that confronts them with a megaphone that alters her voice. When she invites them in she mentions the place belongs to some other guy we don't see. I remember she was looking at a painting of him and said a line that included the words 'All booted up and ready to go', which was like a code phrase of some kind. I remember one of the kids trying to play with the megaphone, but it doesn't work. Eventually they discover her recharging herself with a cable plugged into a socket under her eyepatch. I think the line the girl kid says is, "She's synthetic!' I definitely remember they used the word 'synthetic' rather than just point out the obvious, that she's a robot.

When they try and escape the island, the robot lady pursues them and grabs a kid, saying, "You're grounded!" She gets pushed into the water, and the younger boy quips, "You're drownded!" Corny I know, but it stuck in my memory. At the end one of the girls is making some kind of psychic prediction that there'll be no wind for their sailboat, but then the wind picks up and the boy is pleased that her predictions aren't always right.

I really hope this actually was a full TV show instead of some kind of obscure TV movie. I'm fairly sure it was a TV show though. My best Googling efforts have turned up nil though.

New User wrote:It's been a week since I posted this in the music video identification thread. Since that thread seems to have little activity, I'm trying it here in case there are people who monitor this thread and not that one.

Many years ago I saw a music video on MTV in the mid-1990s.I don't remember much about the song that played. I think it was some kind of electronic music (kind of like Orbital or The Crystal Method) but I could be wrong, and I remember the same syllables being repeated, but it didn't sound like English.In the video, a young girl would wander aimlessly and observe the world around her. She carried with her a cube shaped block, except that the cube was hollow with a square-shaped hole right through the middle. Like a cube with two opposite sides removed. When the girl looked through the cube, she would see something similar but different.I don't recall any of the things she looked at, but the viewpoint perspective would shift from third-person to the girl's first-person perspective, and then show the cube being lifted to her field of vision and what appeared through the cube's aperture was different from what she saw with her normal eyes. I think she would first see something mundane, then when she looked through the cube she would see something fantastic or surreal.At the end of the video, the music stops but the words are repeated. Again, it didn't sound like English, and it showed that an old woman was singing those words to a sleeping girl.I think the song was called Lullaby or something but I could be wrong about that. Lullaby being the only word I have to go on, it is very difficult for me to search for this on the web.I only saw this video once and it was probably 17 years ago or something like that, so I might have misremembered some things. I appreciate any help!

It is, but I found it a long time ago. I never reposted here saying I found it because this thread isn't very active (the entire xkcd fora isn't very active these days). Thanks for replying and for the trouble of making a new account just for me!

Two scenes I remember involve a comedian who is preparing for an audition at a comedy club. He hires a call girl who shows up at his hotel and he tells her to sit in a chair: she says something like "My back is killing me", but he just wants her to sit in a chair and give him feedback, to be his sounding board for his material. He tells a joke, she nods and says something like "I'm still going to get paid, right?"

Later this character is doing the audition, it's not a good performance. The club manager (or something like that) asks him whether he has kids, he says yes, and the manager tells him not unkindly that he should focus on his day job so he can take care of his kids.

I don't even remember whether this fellow was the main character. I remember him as dark haired but balding and tall, someone deep but nasal voice). I only saw the last part of the film.

Remember something that really sits in my mind but cant remember the program or what the episode was called it really Bugs me and been trying for years and years to find it on the net with no success .Can anyone help. What i remember is its a Anthology series ,Never repeated i dont think and i remember watching it with my Mum around about late 70s or early 80s Horror/thriller drama .Its a big Mansion possibly in Scotland or on a island standing on its own. Guests or a family are in the mansion but luring in the shadows and hiding is a spooky eerie lady with a white gown and Knife she hides behind a large fireplace which she pulls out and hides behind think she comes out when its night time and comes out and kills .Nobody knows who is killing because when she kills she goes back and hides behind the fireplace . Remember her coming out and webs are seen around .She has blondish hair looks frightening and glides slowly around with a knife in her hand . All i remember at the end is i think she gets caught by the Police and right at the end police cars are seen entering the grounds and police getting out of car and entering the entrance of the mansion and slowly the camera rises above and looking down and the credits roll .Just recently i have seen the Anthology series Armchair Theater watched a few episodes and seen at the end similar thing camera angle going above then freezing looking down and credits roll is this a episode from Armchair theater or am i wrong anybody know the name of the series and what the Episode is called would love to know. ANYBODY OUT THERE KNOW THE ANSWERS ! ??

OP Tipping wrote:I don't even remember whether this fellow was the main character. I remember him as dark haired but balding and tall, someone deep but nasal voice). I only saw the last part of the film.

Dark-haired but balding could be Billy Crystal in Mr. Saturday Night (1992). I haven't seen it though so I don't know if it has the scene you described.